Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912, in Cody ,Wyoming. His family moved right after his birth to San Diego, California, and subsequently moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and Riverside, California, and Los Angeles. In 1928, Pollock was expelled from Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles for publishing an attack on the school¹s focus on athletics. In the Fall of 1930, he moved to New York where he studied art with Thomas Hart Benton, and by 1938, he was a member of the governments W.P.A. (Works Progress Administration)program as a muralist. At this time he joined an experimental workshop established by David Alfaro Siquerios where he began to forge a more experimental painting style born from European modernism (i.e., cubism, surrealism). After a bout with alcoholism, he was fired from the W.P.A. in 1940, and he began psychoanalysis.
In late 1946, Pollock began the first of his "all over" paintings, which used the technique of pouring and dripping pain on the canvas, thus liberating modern art from the brush and the easel. Whereas his art initially drew on abstraction of forms in the way Picasso, Kandinsky or Miro had done, his "action" paintings were pure abstraction of emotions and form, perhaps influenced by the automatic style of the surrealists. His painting "Full Fathom Five" from 1947, a great swirling work that with a rich attention to the relationship of colors, is a perfect example of Pollock¹s revolutionary style which began the movement known as "Abstract Impressionism," and counted in its ranks such artists such as Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, Willem De Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell and many others. Pollock's most famous works are pure abstraction, and instead of giving many of the paintings names, he numbered them so that the painting would allow the viewer to make their own associations about the work. This style was heavily criticized during the time, and many art critics saw it as meaningless indulgence. In the early 1950s Pollock returned briefly to painting specific forms in his "black period," but soon went back to the abstract work, and just before his death in a car accident in 1956 at the age of 44, Pollock executed perhaps his most fully realized works such as "Number 28," "Blue Poles: Number 11" and "Frieze." On line, check Mark Harden¹s Artchive for a good exhibit of Pollock¹s wrok (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/ftptoc/... There is also the the Web Museum (http://www.artchive.com/artchive/ftptoc/... The Pollock-Krasner Organization, which provides funding for artists, can be found on line as well at http://www.pkf.org/.
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